Start the Year Off Write

Activity #8 of Ten Write Days

Photo by Jeffrey Blum on Unsplash

Reverse Timeline is a great first day writing activity.  The central feature of this lesson is to ask students to go back in time, starting from one hour prior to class, to one day prior, to one week prior, and so on until they reach the limits of their time and memory, which for high school students is about ten years.  

For each of the look backs, students write about their physical environment (where were you an hour ago?), but also who they were emotionally, mentally, spiritually at that time (who were you an hour ago?) and what were you preoccupied with (what were you doing an hour ago?).

         Reverse Timeline illuminates a lot of things for students. 

It reveals their obsessions. If they were obsessed with Five Nights at Freddy’s when they were five, and they still collect FNAF plushies, they are clearly obsessed.

It reveals the impermanence of their own identity. Even though they may have been in school every year for the last ten, each year has been different because they were a different person each year. 

It reveals to them that their worries weren’t the monsters they turned out to be. Most of the things we worry about now never come after us nearly as aggressively as we imagine them to.

Assignment:

Write for about two minutes for each of the following prompts. Describe your physical environment. And who were you one hour ago?  Describe your emotional, mental, spiritual state during this time. And what was on your mind the most? Describe your obsessions, your preoccupations, your state of mind.

·      Where were you one hour ago? 

·      Where were you twenty-four hours ago?

·      Where were you one week ago from today?

·      Where were you one month ago today?

·      Where were you one year ago today?

At this point, I tell students they’ll need to approximate or guess where they probably were because no one has complete recall of their personal history.

·      Where were you five years ago today?

·      Where were you ten years ago today?

After the reverse timeline is assembled in their writing notebook, I ask them to look over the memories that they have unearthed over the last ten years of their life, and to boil it all down into a single word. 

If you had to take the entirety of your existence for the last few years and sum it up in one word, what would it be? 

         Students are amazingly real with this activity:  they boil down their timelines with the words-- family, fear, grace, hope, worry, happiness, etc. From this essence, we unearth an obsession, a preoccupation for them, something that they might want to write about, plus it produces a rich humus of memory compost from which to call forth writing ideas.